Kim Schmitz

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Kim Schmitz aka Kimble (* January 21, 1974 in Kiel) is a German self-proclaimed hacker and businessman.

In the late 90s Schmitz has gained publicity through his several high profile break-in claims. He was part of the German BBS scene and had his own BBS called "House of Coolness". On March 23 1998, Schmitz was sentenced to two years on probation for computer fraud: He hacked into a large number of X.25-connected corporate computer systems and abused international telephone services. By that time, he had already founded a computer security company called "data protect", a contributing factor to the court's decision not to send him back to jail where he had already suffered two months of detention. His arrogant style of dealing with the computer scene and his publication of technical details on phone phreaking earned him top spots the "Most Hated Person" charts in the Worldcharts diskmag for years ahead. (As of the last issue, released in 2002, he was #6.)

He sold data protect in 2000 to "TÜV Rheinland". In 2001 TÜV Data Protect was renamed to TÜV SecureIT. Today Schmitz is on probation for attendance in insider trading: He had harvested huge profits from buying $375,000 worth of shares of the nearly bankrupt company "LetsBuyIt.com" and subsequently announcing his intention of investing EUR 50 Million, creating the biggest single-day rise of a share price in the history of the German stock market. He quickly sold his shares and walked away. To date, he remains the only person to ever have been convicted for insider trading in Germany.

On CeBIT 1999 in Hannover, he displayed a Mercedes S-Class equipped with a GSM channel bank for in-car Internet access and video conferencing. The prohibitive cost of 16 parallel connections turned the project into a huge commercial failure.

Since 2001, Schmitz has had media coverage as a founder of a Hong Kong based investing company called Trendax. The company claimed to use AI for best investment options' selection, but never went public.

Aside from his flamboyant corporate activities, Schmitz got attention for several PR stunts. In 1999 he was driving around on the Munich airport for hours taking photos of himself in the cockpits of parked airplanes. In 2001 he offered a reward of USD 10 million for capture of Osama Bin Laden. His newly founded hacker group "YIHAT" (Young intelligent hackers against terrorism) didn't succeed in any of their anti-terrorism goals.

In January 2002 he announced his own suicide on his personal homepage. In fact his announcement was just part of a marketing campaign for his new project "Kimpire". The Kimpire website was a central point with linked to all of his projects and companies.

Schmitz is active in the streetracing scene. He took part in the Gumball 3000 rally several times and was the first to finish in 2001. He ran a website that claimed he is organising a street race called "Ultimate Rally". The event was originally announced for August 2006, but was postponed to 2007 after collecting money from potential participants. In late 2006, the concept was sold to an unknown investor, and entrants received a refund.

Schmitz is currently reported living between Germany, Hong Kong and Australia. As of late 2006, a number of his websites (including www.kimble.org) are blank. In January 2007, he received venture capital for a new web startup called "employer 2.0" and is now anonymously recruiting staff through a number of channels.

[edit] External links

It is rumored that Kim currently resides in the Philippines.

His latest project seems to be megaupload.com, which has an apparently X-Rated twin site, megarotic.com

Among other projects it is registered to Monkey Limited in Hong Kong.

OwnerShip verification

He has a great world wide Alexa rating, but it is entirely "possible" that they are fake or skewed and based upon the fact that he is distributing the Alexa toolbar to his users.